Pan: the unformed Pan in DH Lawrence’s animist vision – I
“What were you talking about?” asked Mrs. Renshaw, simply curious. She was not afraid of her husband’s running loose.
“We were just saying ‘Pan is dead’,” said the girl.
“Isn’t that rather trite?” asked the hostess.
“Some of us miss him fearfully,” said the girl.
“For what reason?” asked Mrs. Renshaw.
“Those of us who are nymphs–just lost nymphs among farm-lands and suburbs. I wish Pan were alive.”
D.H. Lawrence, The Overtone (1913)
I came to the works of D.H. Lawrence late in life, having been more or less put off his writing by Kate Millet’s fierce and funny taking to pieces of his infamous novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover in her 1970 book Sexual Politics. Millet charged Lawrence with both misogyny and phallocentrism, so I admit, I didn’t look any further than that, and it’s only in the last decade or so, that have I begun to read Lawrence attentively. This post is the first of a two-parter examining Lawrence’s animist vision of Pan with reference to his novella St. Mawr and his essay Pan in America.
Pan is a recurrent theme in the works of D.H. Lawrence. Patricia Merivale points out that Lawrence examined many aspects of the goat-god, from “the Pan-Christ dialectic, the death of Pan, and especially the Gothic-visionary Pan of Machen and his successors, and infused them all with his own mythic conceptions, his own Gothic visions of the ecstasy and terror of the cosmos.” 1 She considers Lawrence to be the most significant of the exponents of the Pan literature tradition. He turns up in a variety of guises in many of Lawrence’s stories and novels. In The Last Laugh (1924) features eerie laughter, wild music and a faun-like bowler-hatted man who is provoked into giving “the weirdest, slightly neighing laugh, uncovering his strong, spaced teeth, and arching his black brows, and watching her with queer, gleaming, goat-like eyes.” In Jimmy and the Desperate Woman Jimmy is described as having “a pure Pan face, with thick black eyebrows cocked up, and grey eyes with a sardonic goaty gleam, and nose and mouth curling with satire. A good-looking, smooth-skinned satyr.”
An insight into Lawrence’s vision of Pan can be found the 1925 novella St. Mawr. American Lou Carrington has settled in England with her Australian husband, Rico – an “almost fashionable” portrait painter. Discontented with the superficiality of urban life, she buys a horse – St. Mawr – whose majestic presence stirs new feelings in her:
“But now, as if that mysterious fire of the horse’s body had split some rock in her, she went home and hid herself in her room, and just cried. The wild, brilliant, alert head of St. Mawr seemed to look at her out of another world. It was as if she had had a vision, as if the walls of her Awn world had suddenly melted away, leaving her in a great darkness, in the midst of which the large, brilliant eyes of that horse looked at her with demonish question, while his naked ears stood up like daggers from the naked lines of his inhuman head, and his great body glowed red with power. What was it? Almost like a god looking at her terribly out of the everlasting dark, she had felt the eyes of that horse; great, glowing, fearsome eyes, arched with a question and containing a white blade of light like a threat. What was his non-human question, and his uncanny threat? She didn’t know. He was some splendid demon, and she must worship him.”
St. Mawr is Pan-like, embodying an irresistable, call to a natural world beyond that of civilisation and human society. At their first meeting, Lou learns that the horse was put out for stud, but refused to mate with the mares; that he cannot be used to pull a cart or trap, and that two men have been injured – one fatally – whilst riding him. She finds that the horse is real whilst all about her becomes more unreal, such as the men she meets who are ” handsome, young, bare-faced unrealities” that are no more than “wraiths of enjoyment, without any genuine substance”. Just as the great horse St. Mawr embodies a Pan-like terror and wildness, so too is his groom, the Welsh Morgan Lewis, steeped in fairy-lore:
“If you didn’t go near the fire all day, and if you didn’t eat any cooked food nor anything that had been in the sun, but only things like turnips or radishes or pignuts, and then went without any clothes on, in the full moon, then you could see the people in the moon, and go with them. They never have fire, and they never speak, and their bodies are clear almost like jelly. They die in a minute if there’s a bit of fire near them. But they know more than we. Because unless fire touches them, they never die. They see people live and they see people perish, and they say, people are only like twigs on a tree, you break them off the tree, and kindle fire with them. You made a fire of them, and they are gone, the fire is gone, everything is gone. But the people of the moon don’t die, and fire is nothing to them. … If you want to matter, you must become a moon-boy. Then all your life, fire can’t blind you and people can’t hurt you.”
Lawrence’s vision of Pan is directly discussed over dinner one night, with a visit from Dean Vyner, an artist who “studied esoteric matters like astrology and alchemy”.
“Your face is curiously like Pan’s,” said Lou to him at dinner.
It was true, in a commonplace sense. He had the tilted eyebrows, the twinkling goaty look, and the pointed ears of a goat-Pan.
“People have said so,” he replied. “But I’m afraid it’s not the face of the Great God Pan. Isn’t it rather the Great Goat Pan!”
“I say, that’s good!” cried Rico. “The Great Goat Pan!”
“I have always found it difficult,” said the Dean, “to see the Great God Pan in that goat-legged old father of satyrs. He may have a good deal of influence–the world will always be full of goaty old satyrs. But we find them somewhat vulgar. The goaty old satyrs are too comprehensible to me to be venerable, and I fail to see a Great God in the father of them all.”
“Your ears should be getting red,” said Lou to Cartwright. She, too, had an odd squinting smile that suggested nymphs. so irresponsible and unbelieving.
“Oh no, nothing personal!” cried the Dean.
“I am not sure,” said Cartwright, with a small smile. “But don’t you imagine Pan once was a great god before the anthropomorphic Greeks turned him into half a man?”
“Ah!–maybe. This is very possible. But–I have noticed the limitation in myself–my mind has no grasp whatsoever of Europe before the Greeks arose. Mr. Wells’s Outline does not help me there, either,” the Dean added with a smile.
“But what was Pan before he was a man with goat legs?” asked Lou.
“Before he looked like me!” said Cartwright, with a faint grin. “I should say he was the god that is hidden in everything. In those days you saw the thing, you never saw the god in it: I mean in the tree or the fountain or the animal. If you ever saw the God instead of the thing, you died. If you saw it with the naked eye, that is. But in the night you might see the God. And you knew it was there.”
“But if they never saw the God in the thing, the old ones, how did they know he was there? How did they have any Pan at all?” said Lou.
“Pan was the hidden mystery–the hidden cause. That’s how it was a Great God. Pan wasn’t he at all: not even a great God. He was Pan. All: what you see when you see in full. In the day-time you see the thing. But if your third eye is open, which sees only the things that can’t be seen, you may see Pan within the thing, hidden: you may see with your third eye, which is darkness.”
“Do you think I might see Pan in a horse, for example?”
“Easily. In St. Mawr!”–Cartwright gave her a knowing look.
Lawrence’s Pan is not the anthropomorphic man-goat of the ancient Greeks, rather, he is an oceanic, infinite presence – both “hidden mystery” and “hidden cause”. For Lawrence, the Greeks, by giving Pan a form, limited his power, just as the Christians did in making him the Devil, and further refined out of existence by poetry and science. In his 1924 essay Pan in America, Lawrence also complains of the poets who “dress up a few fauns and nymphs, to let them run riskily–oh, would there were any risk!–in their private ‘grounds.’ But. alas, these tame guinea-pigs soon became boring. Change the game.” Pan, for Lawrence, is the presence of a “ceaseless living relation” to the universe. Again, in Pan in America he writes:
“Thus, always aware, always watchful, subtly poising himself in the world of Pan, among the powers of the living universe, he sustains his life and is sustained. There is no boredom, because everything is alive and active, and danger is inherent in all movement. The contact between all things is keen and wary: for wariness is also a sort of reverence, or respect. And nothing, in the world of Pan, may be taken for granted.”
This, I feel, is a deep animist vision untinged by apparent romanticism. A world where every element possesses agency and mystery, and humans are but one element – and not the most important by far.
Sources
Jeffrey Mathes Mccarthy. Green Modernism: Nature and the English Novel, 1900-1930 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015)
Patricia Merivale Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969.
Fambrough, Preston. “THE SEXUAL LANDSCAPE OF D. H. LAWRENCE’S “THE PRINCESS”.” CLA Journal 53, no. 3 (2010): 286-301. Accessed April 15, 2021. www.jstor.org/stable/44325643
by D. H. Lawrence
St. Mawr
The Woman who Rode Away and other stories
Collected Short Stories
Pan in America
Notes:
- Merivale, 1969, p194 ↩
